Capitalism: On its last legs or healthy enough to be milked?

In The Strange Death of Tory England, a book full of great lines, Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes, Just as the labour movement had never been quite sure whether the capitalist system was on its last legs and needed only a final push to be toppled, or was healthy enough to be milked over and again, so the cultural-intellectual left had never quite decided whether it liked increasing prosperity or not. I like the above quote, and I would add something analogous for conservatives, that they have never been quite sure whether the capitalist system is an amazing wealth machine with even low-income people being rich on an absolute scale, or whether the system is so fragile that people can barely afford to pay their taxes and that any particular tax or regulation will bankrupt the system. Unfortunately, try as I might, I can’t manage to phrase this as aphoristically as Wheatcroft did. I suppose that every political movement must balance between triumphalism and alarmism. For another example,…